During a panel discussion at LinuxWorld Expo here in San Francisco, CA, Linus Torvalds said that the biggest development in Linux this past year has been the desktop, as reported in this story. "Within the last year, it's progressed past the eye-candy stage," he said during a panel discussion at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, praising the KDE user interface and higher-level applications such as KOffice. Another happy KDE user :-).

Comments

From someone that can't run kernel 2.4 because it freezes when I mount my cdroom on redhat 7.1 I must say I agree, KDE is the most noticeable improvement on linux this year.
Congrats KDE team and all KDE apps developers, coordinators, translators, and helpers!

This is usually due to Linux trying to use DMA disk access mode on a CD drive that does not truely support DMA.

To disable this, you can pass an option to the kernel something like "ide=nodma". If you know which drive the problem is occuring on, you can use hdparm to disable DMA on that drive.

According to Red Hat, the problem is due to some drives claiming to support DMA, despite not truely supporting it. There is a blacklist of these drives in the Linux kernel, and naturally more recent kernels will have more up-to-date blacklists.

no, some earlier versions of the kernel were compiled in c++ mode, using some basic c++ features, but after much complaining about code-generations issues with g++ at the time the makefiles were switched back to c. saying that it was written in c++ is incorrect. however I do not doubt that Linus can write c++ code if he wants.